I would strongly concur with this perspective. I have had hired several people, all of whom had zero VoIP and voice telecom experience prior, and had quite bad luck with, as Troy said, "otherwise qualified" sysadmins/IT people/technicians, while excellent luck with developers. On 10/02/2010 05:00 PM, Troy Davis wrote:
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Darren Schreiber <d at d-man.org <mailto:d at d-man.org>> wrote:
Hey folks, We're hiring rather aggressively at my firm and struggling to find good VoIP folks. Wondering if others have any tips/tricks/posting sites or good sample job listings?
The best results I've seen (not necessarily experienced) have been to hire for DevOps and immerse in VoIP. I've watched ops-savvy developers support VoIP services and I've watched VoIP-centric sysadmins/engineers support VoIP services. The difference was obvious, and I totally believe the argument by Facebook and others that devops folks are 5 or 10 or 20 times more productive as - boiling devops way down - otherwise-qualified engineers who don't code.
So, I'd almost ignore VoIP experience, and I probably wouldn't call the job that.
Facebook might be the best example of hiring only devops folks for all ops engineers, and I think that a lot more domain knowledge is needed to support Facebook than VoIP. My job description for an engineer supporting a VoIP service would be close to "Application Operations" jobs on http://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering. Aside from making it less formal, I'd move my equivalent to its "Advanced experience coding in one of the following languages: Shell, Python or Perl" near the top, and I'd replace the college degree item with a note to describe something they wrote or operate.
I'd mention "Experience with SIP, FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, etc a plus" near the end, but I wouldn't expect or look for it.
I'd post to Github Jobs and Authentic Jobs, and look through who forked/committed to related Github repos. I've done this successfully in the past. In interviewing, I'm not that interested in how big a service they've supported. I care how deeply they can describe the problems they ran into, how they diagnosed them, how they thought about and wrote tests, how they decided what to automate/scale/work on (or punt), and of course what the result was.
I'd set a high bar and explain that. Ignoring how hard it might be to measure, each new hire should increase the ratio of <customers, calls, or other revenue-related metric> per engineer (by more than would have happened merely from the growth in volume). That ratio should grow as long as they're automating the right things, like Facebook's ratio of users per engineer has done. I think including something about this - the metric, the position's potential impact, and maybe even the difficulty of measuring it - in the job description shows that you're savvy and stands out to like-minded people.
Note: I'm assuming "VoIP folks" means one of a dozen common engineering/operations/IT titles applied to the VoIP industry, not codec developers. If you're hiring someone to create a successor to G.729, ignore this email.
Good luck,
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